


I Now Pronounce You Man and Nothing

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-07
Updated: 2014-10-07
Packaged: 2018-02-20 07:51:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2420921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What might have happened during the in-betweens of Episode 3 x 03, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Ex Boyfriend(s) and after...</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Now Pronounce You Man and Nothing

_**I’m climbing the walls over here. I need you.** _

Danny didn't like to text but by the same token, his girlfriend didn’t like to find out that he has not finalized his divorce from his former wife (she isn’t his current wife, no matter what semantics get exercised; she was barely even the loosest definition of that word when they still lived in the same house, even when he couldn’t imagine what his life would be like without her. Being blindsided by her infidelity was a fine wake up call. But it definitely made one thing entirely too clear: Christina was not his wife.) Mindy had stormed off, ranting about Sarah Palin and hunters, and Danny had just stood there, dumbstruck, waiting for her to turn back around, because Mindy was generally more quick to acquiesce than he was. But she didn’t turn back around. 

_**Call your wife.** _

* * *

 

He lies in bed by himself, watching infomercials while wondering when and where precisely he lost the ability to make good decisions, bathed in the flickering glow of the television. Mindy’s side of the bed is cool and smooth, and he finds himself stretching into her unoccupied space, wondering if the pillow might smell like her shampoo. After he mashes his face unceremoniously into the newly washed case (damned efficient housekeeper) and finds nothing but clean cotton, he hops out of bed and out to the couch. There is nothing in here for him tonight. Not sleep, not comfort, not Mindy.

It alarms him how easily she can just be lifted out of his life:  one laundry cycle, one ex-boyfriend with a bone to pick, one stupid inability to admit his own failures.  Just one of any of these, and she's gone.   And he just scored the hat trick.

 

 

* * *

 

He goes to Mindy’s ex-boyfriend’s office to start a fight, and maybe draw some blood. He is very satisfied at the rate of force he is able to apply to the door when he enters abruptly. But he’s getting older now, and punching assholes in the face is less fun than it used to be. Especially when said asshole is an attorney.

Instead, he fixes it; it only involves indirectly setting fire to his second most valuable belonging and signing a few thousand pieces of paper while being stared down by an aggro-lawyer who used to see Mindy naked. It is only as awkward as it sounds.

To make it up to her, in a roundabout way, he goes to a place that smells like rosewater and patchouli and pets a strange cat with a stranger name to buy her a dresser. A dresser that looks like nothing he would voluntarily own, but is exactly the inanimate object version of Mindy, if she held clothes instead of wore them. It costs a damn arm and a leg, and Danny wonders if this is what his whole life will look like now; always making up for the last transgression and waiting to commit the next one.

There aren’t enough dressers in the world.

He barely even has to lure her to his apartment (see, she forgives, like plush or velvet or jersey knit; he knows because she lectured him once about jersey knits after a particularly stressful episode of _Project Runway_ ) after work, only having to promise exclusive access to his freezer. She barely even alludes to their fight (okay, slightly more than barely). She likes the new furniture, and the gesture, and the idea that maybe she has a place there, in his apartment, in his life.

The closet is surprisingly conducive to performing acts of sexual congress; Danny uses the clothes hanging bar as leverage and Mindy’s eyes roll back into her head not once, but twice. There is something oddly comforting about the _thump thump thwack_ noises that they produce, pillowed by his three polo shirts and myriad button down oxfords. It is dark, but warm, and very compact.

They still fit.

As they lay in bed, together, finally, she calls his smile dreamy. Mindy eats sticky, fresh pineapple out of a bowl, and he tries not to use himself as a human shield to keep the juices from dripping onto his clean linens. She is eating fruit voluntarily, after all. Baby steps. She feeds him some and he licks the sweetness off her fingers, never once taking his eyes off of hers. They’re so big and brown, and when she outlines them with the thick black swoops of eyeliner, he has a harder time not staring into them. He looks at her for so long that she thinks that she has pineapple between her teeth (which she does, incidentally) but he really just enjoys being able to take her in, every once and a while. He wants to remember that she belongs to him, not as a possession, but as a connection, someone with whom he has relevance. Especially after he's hurt her.

He knows that his heart is riddled with fault lines, and along with it, his psyche, and being with her should mend them.  But he wonders if it is even possible to be mended. Maybe he can’t come back from any of it, not anymore.

He wants to tell her that he didn’t get divorced because…reasons. There are probably hundreds, but he can whittle it down to a few, none of which will matter to her, because the only thing she’ll remember is that he lied.

Before the other day (he isn’t even sure which day now, everything is blurry and odd shaped, but he can see potato chips and _My Man Godfrey_ and a tiny suitcase disappearing) she’d have believed anything that he told her. He invented the internet. He made his own cheese. He wasn’t married anymore.

Now he really isn’t married, because annulled was never the same as divorced, even though he pretended that it was. He buttered his bread, now he has to lie in it; or some such.

Whose fault is it exactly that he's (newly) divorced? 

It could have been Christina's fault:  ignoring all the promises and the vows they made, committing the fraud that she would love and adore him for eternity when she could barely do it for five years? Five years, and he thought he knew her sighs and her moods and what the hell difference did it make? He knows Mindy just as well, if not better, because he has those five years of learning her sighs, and moods, plus all the times he put his hand on the small of her back to keep her from wandering into traffic because they were friends, plus the growing need to put that hand lower down her backside.

Friends don’t let friends wander into traffic. Danny feels like he is constantly wandering into the middle of a busy thoroughfare, and it is a rare occasion that someone is there to guide him to safety. Mindy’s been that person for as long as he can remember, but it doesn’t stop him from having difficulty discerning where things begin and where they end; of knowing if what was lost has been found.

Is getting divorced his fault because he wasn’t kind enough to Christina? He was too wrapped up in his residency? He wasn’t available? Or maybe he didn’t pay enough attention to little details. Not like how he does with Mindy: always listening and observing, treating her like he’s an investigative journalist or he’s studying her in the wild like Dian Fossey and the gorillas. How else would he know about her affinity for thick breads, towels on floors, or knowing exactly when she’s about to throw one of those tantrums where she lies on her rug and acts like she’s the first person ever to have a problem? He has the benefit of tactical, hands-on experience with her, and still, he can’t quite seem to get it right.

He knows that is unequivocally his fault that he didn't go straight to an attorney the day that he found Christina in bed with another man.  He is fully culpable for believing that annulled made his marriage null and void enough (turns out there are not degrees of married, Castellano) that he wouldn't have to take the final step to clean up his muck.  He remembers yelling at Mindy about the faucet, about ignoring messes, and he knows that trait is not exclusive to his girlfriend.

All he knows now is that he is finally fully and unequivocally severed from his marriage. Cliff pronounced him man and nothing earlier that afternoon; that was pretty much exactly it. He is now man and nothing, and he’s been avoiding it for years.

Mindy lines her arm up next to his and tells him that they look good together, and she keeps him around because she likes how well he goes with most of her outfits. He's fine with that as long as she keeps him. He likes being pressed up against the contours of her skin, and how even though they just had sex, she’s still a little cool to the touch. Danny runs his finger down her leg and gives her a very earnest expression, not understanding why and how he can never manage to get out the words when he needs them most.

 

* * *

Eventually, the words come, but not how he wants them to.  It is not in his nature to benefit from timing or circumstance anymore.

It's dark, and they're sleepy, but Danny is compelled to make sense of the last few days.  “God, Mindy, we are the opposite of meant to be.”

She licks her lips and gives him a full side eye, and he wishes he would have made sure there was a matching credenza before he opened his big fat dreamy mouth. He's going to have to pet that creepy cat again.  He can feel it in his bones.  “This line of conversation is ill-advised, Daniel.” Something passes over her face, and she says, much more quietly, “We’re not meant to be?”

That isn’t what he means, but he’s trying to speak in Mindy terms, because he doesn’t have them for himself. He speaks Danny and apparently some dialect of Inuit or Eskimo, and none of those languages contain effective terminology when discussing relationships. He recovers, as well as he can, “Nah, we’re meant to work hard for it. Together, obviously.”

“You probably want to rethink how you start sentences, from here on out.” Mindy’s forehead grooves with thought, and he marvels at how she can always be so sure of him. Not that he isn’t sure of her, but he’s never even been close to sure of himself. “You make me nervous sometimes.”

“I know, I make myself nervous."  

"There you go again." She says, dryly.

"I just wanted to lay it all out there, you know, so we didn't have anymore secrets."  He gestures to them both, their naked bodies forming an ampersand in his bed. 

"I'm all for a little mystery, Danny, I promise.  But you can't keep springing this stuff on me.  Or letting weird ex-boyfriends do it.  What dirt is Deslaurier going to have on you?  You got your medical license from a Cracker Jack box?" 

"There isn't much else to tell, I promise."  He mentally flips the Rolodex of his transgressions, and comes up blank.

"But it's almost impossible to really know all of you."  She wiggles out of his grasp, breasts grazing the duvet.  She is creating distance that he doesn't have the energy to cross.   It isn't Mindy that's exhausted him. 

"You know me."  He isn't sure if he means for it to come out like a plea, but it does. 

"Look at the two pages, single spaced of secrets that you hadn’t told me. And you write really small, like a serial killer."

"But I told you all of them."

"And yet, after two pages, single spaced, you were still married."  Mindy looks at him very pointedly, and he realizes that the dresser didn't solve all of his problems forever.

He grimaces. "I was annulled. And anyway, now I’m not. I’m nothing." 

Mindy studies his face, still too far from him, "I think that you might be the first man I ever met that was a commitment-phile.  You're the opposite of phobic.  You crave it."

Danny can't disagree.  He held on to the worst thing in the world because he was afraid not to hold onto it. 

"I crave _you._ "  He pursues her now, "I love you."

"I know."  Mindy looks like a goddess, nude, with her hair sweeping over her shoulder, and he wants to consume her. "That's what gets in the way, Danny." 

He's looming over her now, waiting to pounce, to cleanse whatever wrongs he's committed, and will continue to commit.  He can't see into the future, he can't change the past, and he has no historical evidence that indicates that he has any clue how to be in a healthy, functional relationship.  He just knows that her body is slowly heating under his, and that she is beginning to make those little fluttering sounds.  He mutters into her clavicle, about not wanting anything else in their way, about keeping from making any more mistakes, even as he explores her contours with his mouth and tongue. 

She pulls on his hair, and her voice is low and slow, "It's okay if you mess up sometimes, Danny.  I think I like that better."

 

 

 


End file.
